What is hello X?
Can stories shape our future? We think so.
hello X is a story laboratory to collectively imagine X, a young woman 50 years into the future. The first season of hello X asks how human impacts on the Arctic ecosystem (think: climate change, pollution, industrial food production) might affect food webs and food culture for X in 2068.
You can contribute to the first cycle of X short stories by going to the WRITE page. Listen to the PODCASTS to meet scientists, artists, and other special guests, review your contributions, and dig into the present day stories that inform our evolving visions of X. Go to MEET to read featured story ideas, debate issues with our creative and scientific teams, and propose new story games. This is a laboratory with live experiments, and lots of potential surprises, so subscribe to the hello X NEWSLETTER to keep up-to-date on new developments and receive invitations to live events (both online and away-from-keyboard).
Our mission
Ice-9's mission is to build experimental spaces for productive play with stories. These spaces are online, on the street, in classrooms and museums. Our strategy is improvisational, collaborative, and networked. Our process creates positive feedback loops between science, art, and education, supporting a transition towards a knowledge-based circular economy in an inclusive, just, and democratic global society.
Productive storyplay means serious fun — serious because we tackle scary real-world scenarios, and fun because we learn to collectively channel fears, doubts, even rage, into stories that ultimately nurture love for X and her unborn generation. An investment of love in X today, can yield us rewards in the forms of purpose, courage, and hope (compounded daily). And best of all, X inherits this fortune alongside a vision far beyond mere survival.
Ice-9
Ice-9 was founded in 2014 by artists Christine Cynn & Valentin Manz. Christine is a film director/producer and conceptual artist who has been playing with documentary/fiction hybrids since 1996 (including co-direction of The Act of Killing). Valentin Manz has been creating interactive environments, sculptures, and visual art since 1990. He specializes in process-based art, created within communities in dialogue with local stories and landscapes. Ice-9 is based in Tromsø, Northern Norway.
The team
Illustration by Valentin Manz
Contact us
Our collaborators
Creative team
The hello X creative team is led by Christine Cynn and includes writers, dramaturgs, filmmakers, visual artists, performers, musicians, digital designers, and programmers from around the world.
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The hello X science team is led by environmental anthropologist Ann Eileen Lennert and includes marine biologists, bioenergeticists, ecotoxicologists, and more from our partner research institutes (see FRAM High North Research Center for Climate and the Environment and Nansen Legacy Project links below.
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